Azaleos Survey Finds 44 Percent of Enterprises Plan to Migrate to Exchange 2010 in First 18 Months

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Azaleos^® Corporation, the managed messaging and collaboration services company, today released the findings of an independent survey conducted by Osterman Research on Microsoft Exchange 2010 migration plans among enterprises with 1,000 or more users. The research found that Exchange 2010 adoption has already achieved significant momentum with 44 percent of respondents reporting that they plan to migrate to the new email platform within the next 18 months. The majority of these enterprises are doing so to take advantage of usability enhancements and new built-in capabilities that reduce Exchange’s reliance on and make it easier to integrate with third party products.

“The Osterman Research report illustrates that Exchange 2010 has largely overcome the traditional ‘wait for SP1’ attitude among enterprises that plan to migrate to a new version of Microsoft software”

In the six months since the release of Exchange 2010, Azaleos has migrated a host of existing and new customers across a wide range of industries to this new platform. Michael Osterman will discuss his research findings in a free webinar hosted by Azaleos on May 5 that will examine the benefits and best practices for running Exchange 2010 in large (10,000+ seats) enterprise environments.

In the report entitled “Embracing Exchange 2010: Momentum, Migration and Growth in the New World of Messaging”, available here, Osterman Research identified the following key drivers for moving to Exchange 2010:

Large mailbox support (50% of respondents)
Improvements and flexibility in storage, including storage utilization, footprint and storage options such as Direct Attached Storage (50%)
Built-in archiving, retention policies, transport rules and compliance capabilities (48%)
Improved high availability and disaster recovery with Disaster Availability Groups (40%)

Meanwhile, two leading reasons cited by respondents for not migrating to Exchange 2010 were:

Budget constraints (57%)
Difficulty switching from non-Microsoft email platform (31%)

“This research revealed two fundamental catalysts for migrating to a new email platform: the desire to make the infrastructure more flexible, cited by 59% of respondents; and the need to drive down the cost of providing email service for employees,” said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, Inc. “Email infrastructure flexibility will become extremely important over the next two to three years as organizations implement unified communications systems, which require moving siloed communications workloads, such as SharePoint and Office Communications Server, into an integrated system.”

“The Osterman Research report illustrates that Exchange 2010 has largely overcome the traditional ‘wait for SP1’ attitude among enterprises that plan to migrate to a new version of Microsoft software,” said Scott Gode, vice president of marketing for Azaleos. “Clearly, certain objections remain, including budget issues and the difficulty associated with migrating to a new platform. However, in our engagements with customers and prospects we’ve found that if an organization is presented with the benefits of using Exchange 2010, and has a cost-effective way to get there, they have been very open to making a wholesale migration.”

About Azaleos

Azaleos Corporation provides the benefits of hosted email and collaboration services for organizations that can’t or won’t allow their data to reside outside the datacenter. Azaleos’ 24X7 remotely managed services for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, Office Communications Server, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server keep information on-premise and under IT control, while uptime, maintenance, and support is handled by experts in its network operations centers. Hundreds of companies from Fortune 500 to mid-market enterprises rely on Azaleos and its patented ViewX and SecureX technologies to manage their collaboration infrastructures and address issues before users ever know they exist. Azaleos is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and one of Microsoft’s top 35 NSI partners in the US. For more information visit www.azaleos.com.